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Freedom
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Didn't they ban factions (perhaps this was Stalin's time)?
We can move the conversation there if you want, but I don't see how that's related to worker-owned press
It's related to the subject of fascism and censorship
Censorship, we can argue about it. Fascism, no.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions...
The two systems were the polar opposite, it's the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn't seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn't the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR's legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Killing and repressing fascists and other reactionary forces is good actually. Progressive forces being killed and the masses oppressed is bad.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I'll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia "demographics of X" articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren't for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.